Hacker News Reader

Comment by lowpro | Hacker News Reader

Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care. You can see it in most aspects of the nation, from the NSA revelations largely being accepted in a sigh of hopelessness to the several social issues that have been in the news since 2014 and haven't seemed to move. People just don't take an interest in the larger issues except to tweet their thoughts and move on. I wonder if, for example, when events like 9/11 or Katrina happened people were moved more to donate or help because they couldn't just say "thinking of the victims" in a public social media space and move on with their day. And I don't think mandatory voting is a solution to this issue because people will default to laziest method, which would probably be whose name they heard the most. The big picture idea is how to make people care, and that is probably the biggest unsolved issue of our day.

View on HN

People have been cynical about politics and politicians for hundreds -- thousands -- of years. This was the single most illuminating fact of some of my college literature courses -- reading the views of the past as recorded at the time, vs the slanted "everything was great!" or "everything was terrible!" perspectives we usually get from today. (Your specific mistake here is thinking that not caring about something you care about -- like the NSA stuff -- is the same as total apathy.)

There's no magical "back in the day" when everything was better. It's up to us to make things better, lamenting changes or new technology and longing for a lost past that never was won't help.

Long before we had "fake news" vs "real news" we had "no news" and hearsay from a dude in a bar. Same shit, different day.

I think you are right. Also people are being worn down by the 24 hr news cycle and always on social media. It's hijacked our emotions into thinking facebooks likes or retweets matter more than voting or going out in the world and doing something.

The other side is most people aren't doing well financially.I know tons of people who work all the time, and are just too exhausted/demoralized by the end of day for anything but tv and beer.

The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming.

In addition to all of that, my personal experience has been the following:

Setting: 2016 US Election

  - Everybody is screaming in my ear all day every day "YOUR VOTE COUNTS, GET IN THERE AND VOTE"
  - Tons of people go to vote
  - The candidate with the lesser number of votes wins the election

And that's why I don't care to vote anymore. I don't know enough about politics, social sciences, or whatever the fuck else gobbledygook to take a stance on whether or not this result makes sense.

All I know is, simply put, my vote feels worth nothing and so I now deafen myself to politics as much as possible. Much more worthwhile to focus energy on building businesses and making money that I can donate to charity rather than wasting away in my armchair yelping about politics proven to be outside my control.

As someone from a rural area (my vote likely had more weight) in the state where a third-party candidate got 20% of the vote (Utah, McMullan), I'm not sure I feel much differently. There are simply a lot of people out there, not to mention all the ones who didn't vote.

It's frustrating to be surrounded by those who think conservative media is not only flawless, but the only source of truth, who feel cornered to vote for a candidate that they don't believe in because they feel beholden to our two-party system. If we could simply make those individuals feel confident in the ability of their vote, we would get right out of the two-party system.

As bleak as things are, though, I haven't given up. To do so would be to give up my liberty to these idiots, without a fight.

As someone smart and technical enough to hang out on HN, if your argument for dropping out of the political process boils down to “I can’t be bothered to understand how my country’s electoral system works”, that’s pretty weak.

On top of that, people don't realize how little the federal government (Presidential Election) affects them, nor how much their local elections affect them. Our local elections here get 4,000 votes per candidate. In a city of 120,000 people that's pretty much shit. Your local and state elections impact your lives substantially more than anything at the federal level.

Whether or not your city closes/opens drug/alcohol treatment centers or homeless shelters will affect your life much more than Trump boasting about how he's going to build a wall.

Indeed, plus it's in our best interests to get involved in local govt. because our voices are much easier to hear at that level. At the federal level, your vote is competing against 300 million other citizens (assuming they all vote, which isn't the case). If you're considering a town of 30k, voicing your opinions and making meaningful change is much more realistic.

Heck, the town supervisor from my hometown lived on the street right behind us. Growing up, it would be possible to hop across the fence in the backyard and be in his yard. Talk about access to your representatives.

Too much emphasis is being placed on the federal govt., which I believe is a terrible trend for all of us Americans. Trump made a huge wave of anger after withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but there is nothing stopping my home state from making their own ad-hoc agreement (of course, states do not have authority to engage in international diplomacy, but I'm speaking about the principle of, say, NYS committing itself to a zero-carbon emission pledge within XX years, and setting goals for all the towns and cities to help contribute).

Federal doesn't matter, until it does. It's decisive, for example, for war and peace. Those tend to have rather large effects on people.

Even without considering the lives lost, both American and foreign: The Afghan & Irak war have cost $5 trillion over the years. That's $60,000 for every US family of four that could have been put to other uses if those wars had been limited to a fast and cheap campaign against the Taliban government.

USA military doesn't do fast and cheap. The whole point of the operation was to funnel trillions of dollars to armaments manufacturers and their sockpuppets in media and politics. If Afghanistan/Iraq hadn't had that potential, they would have agitated for War in some other unfortunate locales.

That is really a good point, how many people know what their local government spends money on. If politicians aren't being watched, they will steal.

More pointing out that 3/4's of the votes are effectively meaningless.

Don't forget China holds elections, but that does not mean people's votes count.

The presidential election is not the only one. Even if you live in a solid red or blue state, there are issues at lower levels of government that impact you more directly, and that you in turn can impact.

So vote for every position that's not the president. i.e., the ones that matter.

The local school board members cannot invade other countries, or lower taxes without paying for them (essentially raising taxes on my children).

If local elections really "mattered", I'm sure the two party system would have found a way for the people of Florida and or Ohio to "elect" them for me.

Local election seem to matter to RWA/"conservative" types who want to include intelligent design, anti climate change in their school books or put 10 Commandments monuments in public spaces.

(Insert an observation about Alabama here)

I'm not super familiar with American politics but I've come to realize that voters who want more "omph" should vote in the primaries.

The republican primaries had 31M votes. The presidential election had 137M. In the primaries voters also get a wider selection of candidates to choose from.

I don't know if there is anything preventing voters from participating in both the democrat and the republican primaries. If it's allowed I'd just pray that two great candidates win in the primaries and not fret to much about the presidential election.

>The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming.

There's no such thing as the "alt-left".

I would posit the alternative theory that perhaps things are going well enough that people don’t have to care and thus they don’t. Government is one of those things most people ignore unless it’s broken and usually pretty badly at that. The problems you mention are real and worrying to those that understand them but are still pretty far removed from ordinary people’s lives. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that happens when systems work so well we forget they are there. Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again.

This theory is not supported by voter turnout in European countries with less poverty and more happiness (measured by various indexes).

That said, yes, you might see a fall out of government not working. But rebuilding a welfare state will take generations. If you don't fix the political system this will fail too.

Usually you judge whether something is broken when it fails to meet your expectations. In America with it’s individualistic culture I suspect the government is expected to behave differently than in those eastern european countries. A fair amount of people in the US don’t expect it to be a welfare state at all. Furthermore, measuring people’s happiness says nothing of their satisfaction of the government.

I was thinking more of the northern European countries that are closer to the US in terms of wealth.

> Usually you judge whether something is broken when it fails to meet your expectations

Most Americans I talk to say that they want their government to help people who needs help: mentally ill, uninsured people with medical conditions.

Even conservative Americans agrees that people in need should be helped. How else would you call yourself a Christian.

Nevertheless, I see people in desparate need of help on American streets every day. Are you saying this is a new thing, and that it haven't been broken for 20-30 years?

How did they measure happiness? With a ruler and compass?

How do you measure it cross-culturally? It’s a farce metric that’s used by politicians because they can make it bend however they want. Ecuador is happy too, maybe we should be more like them? If Zimbabwe was happy would that be evidence we need to be more like Zimbabwe?

How did they measure happiness?

http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/

If people only care about politics when the system is broken, why do 80-90% vote in elections.

My point is that people don't vote because the system is broken. People are more likely to vote if they believe it to make a difference.

People in the US have lost faith in democracy. This is unlikely to cause more people to vote. I'm not offering a solution. Just that things are not magically going to become better because people are going to start voting when things are this bad.

> Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again

As a scenario and extension to your theory, what if the period of people largely not caring results in an entirely different class of politician being more successful, where partisanship and political maneuvering are more useful than actually achieving useful change? When "stuff breaks down and people start caring again", what if those politicians aren't up to the job of actually fixing what's breaking?

I'm not sure that necessarily explains our current status, but it is a morbid line of thought.

>Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care.

Or maybe a better explanation is that the will of the people is actively surpressed? Be it voter ID laws surpressing Democrats, or the democrats themselves surpressing the voices of progressives through superdelegates and closed primaries, there are serious issues with our democracy.

Throw in a populace that's been the victim of a failing education system for decades due to candidates who slash taxes (and thus budgets).

And now, when the problems are so acute, I find it very interesting that the narrative becomes that all these issues are the fault of the lazy voters. A convenient, and false narrative.

I don't think being required to prove you're an American citizen with a photo ID is suppression of the will of the people

I agree, in general, at least in states where an ID is trivial to obtain and dirt cheap. A sibling poster suggests $8 for a 4-year ID in Ohio. I just looked at the CA DMV, and they're $29 (5-year, I believe), but they have an $8 option for people who meet certain income requirements.

Now, getting to the DMV to apply for an ID card can be a hardship on people given the hours that the DMV operates and the fact that you usually need to set aside several hours to deal with waiting in line and such. If you hold 2 or 3 jobs, and missing part of a shift means getting fired, you probably don't have the time to go to get an ID. (Hell, you probably also don't have the time to actually go to the polls to vote, but that's another issue.)

And what if you're homeless? Getting an ID is probably very low on the list of things you can afford, even at $8. Also how do they mail it to you if you don't have an address?

At any rate, isn't this fixing a problem I don't think we don't have? Where is the evidence of rampant voter fraud that would recommend even an ID requirement?

I had a doctor's appointment on Friday. While checking in, I overheard the plight of a new mother who didn't have ID, and whose infant therefore could not be seen by the doctor. Fortunately, the clerk's call to a more enlightened manager prevented the potential travesty. The ID-obsessed sense some moral failings on the part of those who have difficulty obtaining IDs, and their instinctive reaction is to make difficult lives yet more difficult.

70 Years ago: "I don't think being required to prove you're a literate citizen with a test is suppression of the will of the people"

If you look at the people affected it's clear that it is racial disenfranchisement under a different name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

One is a measure of mental aptitude. The other is a physical thing that proves you are a constituent entitled to all privileges of citizenship, including voting. This analogy makes no sense to me, can you explain it better?

An ID does no such thing -- That's what voter registration is for.

I've never understood this sort of reasoning. Requiring an ID has nothing to do with race. It turns out that the percentage of people that have an ID varies by race - and this makes requiring an ID a form of racial disenfranchisement?

Requiring IDs and then denying IDs to a particular race would be racial disenfranchisement. Simply requiring an ID isn't.

And in the end, I think it makes a lot of sense for an ID to be required in order to place a vote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...

Because there are barriers, and expensive fees for many, intentional or not. The article above gives a couple stories of the issues people face trying to get ID for voting.

Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting, these are new versions of poll taxes.

> Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting

And yet, no politician campaigns for that because it would actually resolve the issue.

Free, universal, automatic ID would totally be the technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct answer. Which is to say, it's wrong, because the issue is not "voter fraud", the issue is "voters who aren't conservative," because when one erects barriers to voting, conservatives (who tend to be white and more affluent, as a rule, in the areas where these shenanigans are going on) will turn out and everybody else won't.

A politician who campaigns for that will be beset upon by the right wing as it heaves into a fit over they're spying on us, they're trying to track us. Because in actually solving the nonexistent problem, they threaten the true reason for the problem being posed.

No, the issue is that there are people who need an government-issued ID but the barrier to getting one is too high.

But you decided to take only the slice of the problem that fit your talking point, and that is the real problem.

Lowering the barrier to entry causes screams from that same contingent, just the same as "here's an ID, for free, right now". I know this, because I have been (peripherally) involved with folks trying to push such systems and the pushback from the drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub crew is real and it is strong.

My "talking point", such as it is, is that one political party is actively disinterested in democracy (while the other is more or less ambivalent), and that nobody in that actively-disinterested party is going to let the ambivalent party make this happen. Because it empowers them for it to not happen. It's not rocket science.

> Requiring an ID has nothing to do with race. It turns out that the percentage of people that have an ID varies by race - and this makes requiring an ID a form of racial disenfranchisement?

Yes. The argument is pretty straightforward: explicitly mentioning race would be blatantly illegal, so legislators are targeting a variable that correlates with race and using that as a proxy instead. Old-school disenfranchisement laws did much the same thing, using the voting eligibility of one's grandfather as the condition for exemption from poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on (whence we get the term "grandfather clause").

so if requiring an id has nothing to do with race then what does it have to do with? cases of voter fraud where someone impersonates someone else are very rare. Are there more people out there would want to vote so badly that they will impersonate someone else (but not make up a fake id to do so) or are there more eligible voters without ids?

The founders didn't have photo IDs.

In person voter fraud is extremely rare[1], this is why requiring photo ID to vote has been struck down as voter supression in many states[2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/03/he...

[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693...

That's irrelevant. They did have slaves, doesn't mean slavery was a good system.

IDs should be required but they should also be very easy to obtain. The government should go out of its way to make it as easy a possible. Being undocumented is not useful to any citizen, it creates an underclass. People should have IDs and we should care about voter fraud, whether its 1 vote or 1 million.

That the parties won't do this shows that both sides have something to gain by keeping things the way they are, they just want to win, regardless of the sanctity of the vote or the well-being of the people.

Being undocumented only creates an underclass if you require people to be documented!

There's nothing inherently wrong with existing as a living being without declaring your existence (or, realistically, asking permission for your existence) to the government.

Nobody is complaining about animals roaming the world freely without documents. In fact birds routinely cross borders without being stopped or even noticed.

Why do people need to be monitored?

So they can be taxed?

If you have documentation requirements of any kind (dejure or defacto), without documentation you are at a disadvantage. There's a lot of processes that require single if not multiple forms of ID, today.

You don't have to mandate it for anything but voting. But if you do want one, they should be easy for anyone to obtain. If the poor can't prove who they are, they can't do a lot. They'll always be poor.

>IDs should be required

Do you have a source to support this claim?

As I previously pointed out, voter fraud is incredibly rare[1] practically non-existent.

Creating laws and administering laws both take time and resources. Can you support your claim identification is needed with any sort of rational, data based arguments or are you operating on emotion?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/03/he...

Considering the vote is the centerpiece of democracy, to ignore fraud of any kind or to not safeguard your democracy is on its face illogical or at least questionable.

Of course it would take time and resources, but to make it easy for people to obtain IDs would be one of the cheaper things we can do as a nation.

You need an ID to get a lot of jobs, get funding for school, etc. If it's not easy for people to get IDs, we are limiting them anyway, so by argument we should be making them easy to obtain. That's my datapoint. It's a very natural way to empower people.

Is there a reason an ID shouldn't be required to vote?

The source of the source you link to kind of backs up OP's point. It's not an unbiased source. So why do they think ID's should not be required?

I mean just thinking about, verifying who a person is before they vote seems like 101 common sense to me.

As stated several times, instituting ID requirements disenfranchises people at an extremely high rate compared to the number of 'fraudulent' votes that are stopped. There's a reason that Voter IDs are the centerpiece of several anti-democratic voter suppression efforts:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/05/ho...

This stuff isn't accidental.

One political side (the bent of the source you site) would like to be able to load a bunch of folks who can't be arsed to get IDs (a part of adult modern life) into buses, fill them full of rhetoric and drive them to the polls in an emotional fervor without impediments.

The other side would like to keep this same group (who can't be arsed to get IDs) from voting by whatever means necessary. Drug laws and felony disenfranchisement are likely part of this same scheme.

I'm not pleased with political shenanigans in general. And objectively I think if IDs are required they should be very easy to get and cost free even. That's the real problem.

But saying we don't need to verify who a person is before they vote is just f'n fishy as hell. Shenanigans. All cries about "disenfranchisement" aside. Washington Post (and friends) put this stuff out because they are clearly in first group.

It's too bad you are getting downvoted, you aren't wrong, it's just not fun to hear.

If this statement can be made in this same thread and upvoted as an argument for why IDs are too difficult to get for voting purposes, surely that's an unnecessary hardship irrespective of voting and should be fixed.

If the demographic for whom getting an ID is an undue burden suddenly became supporters of the other side I have little doubt the argument would get flipped around.

But it still would be a ridiculous argument.

ID's should be easier to get, yes, but the fact it's an inconvenience for some small minority of people shouldn't undermine the principals of one person one vote nor make it difficult to verify eligibility.

Reason: the difficulty of obtaining accepted forms of ID can disenfranchise more voters than any thwarted voter fraud does.

ID is required to vote—remember that we're talking about which kinds of ID are to be accepted.

So the argument should be, how much assurance do you need to allow a citizen to vote? No security is perfect, and increased security usually decreases usability.

The founders made a system which required landed property to vote. "They didn't require photo IDs" is ridiculous.

This isn’t the piece I was looking for but it makes the case that what seems obviously easy and affordable isn’t.

https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-har...

The intent of those laws are to be supressive.

If you started expanding something like social security numbers to be a real ID system with photo ID and digital 2FA, then maybe in 10-15 years you can make it a requirement.

That's how long time adopting of such systems takes in other countries... With much smaller populations

In theory, it might not be; the actual proposals there have been advanced have been attempts at voter suppressions with partisan (and usually class and racial, as well) bias.

Establish a universal ID first and eliminate any access bias then we can talk about requiring it to vote. Given that there is no evidence of any real problem that it actually solves in voting, it's more important to avoid creating new problems than to rush into it as a solution for speculative potential future problems.

The fact is that before Republicans began pushing for voter id laws in states there were very very few proven cases of voter fraud. So if there wasn't a problem with voter fraud, what was the point of trying to pass the laws?

It's probably very hard to prove fraud when no one uses an id

How much does a photo ID cost? It's a poll tax any way you slice it.

About a decade ago my ID expired. This wasn't a huge deal since I don't drive and rarely travel. About a year ago I did want to hop on a plane to visit my nephew in San Diego. So I was thinking getting a new ID wouldn't be a huge problem.

So I go into the DMV with my expired ID and expired passport and a stack of mail with my current address and a stack of debit and credit cards and my social security card. They will not do anything without my birth certificate. Crap.. Lost that when my basement flooded. I will head over to vital records.

Then the lady at the DMV told me that they closed down the vital records office in Eugene and my only option was to go to Portland. So right here I have to spend 60 bucks on a round trip to get to Portland two hours away.

So I get the bus the next day and go to vital records. Again more expense for the Max. So I get them to print out a birth certificate. I had to pay 40 bucks for them to do it. Then they want to see my ID. Wait it is expired. They will not accept it.

I am told my options are to have a parent or sibling come in to vouch for me. Difficulty.. Parents are dead and my sister at the time lived on the east coast.

So here I am stuck. I know, I will have my sister get on a plane to come out here. It will cost but it needs to be done. So she does. So now I need to pay for a last minute ticket for her. And shit, it will be a while so I need to get a hotel for the night. And I should probably cover my sisters lost wages for a few days.

In the end I got my birth certificate. Off to the DMV where I paid 40 bucks for a state issued ID.

This all was fantastically expensive.

And really.. They closed the vital records office in a city that has 200,000 people. The only option for the entire state is Portland. One office for 4 million people and Oregon is a physically large state.

So yes.. Getting a state issued ID can be incredibly hard and expensive. Even if everything was perfect and I was able to easily get the documents it would still be 80 bucks to just get a ID card.

You must be a bit of a hermit ;-). There's a list of documents that you could have brought any three of, which includes things like utility bills, paystubs, insurance policy, personal check, etc. Sixteen different options, and I honestly don't know anybody in my circle of friends who couldn't pull off at least three of them.

I otherwise agree with your point, if it is that ID is too expensive to require for voting. It amounts to a poll tax.

Better to make it the job of a federal agency. Let's call it the Federal Elections Commission. ID is free, and they track you down to issue it, kinda like the census. Then I might be able to support requiring the ID for voting.

I had utility bills since that is pretty much the only mail I receive. And I had checks and pay stubs. They were very clear. No birth certificate no ID. I had my insurance card too. And funny enough my voter registration card too. For some reason I keep that in my wallet.

Sorry, I think I wasn't clear -- at the DMV you were definitely out of luck without the birth certificate. I'm just saying there is a pretty wide open list of what would have worked for getting your birth certificate from vital records. Utility bill, paystub, and personal check should have done it as all are on the list of sixteen choices. Still a great big hassle, but cheaper and faster than flying out your sister from the east coast :).

It's a chicken and egg problem. I understand and respect why they want to make it hard to get the birth certificate since we've made it the key to the kingdom. It used to be quite easy to get when I was younger, I for some reason have three copies of mine from over the years.

>Sixteen different options, and I honestly don't know anybody in my circle of friends who couldn't pull off at least three of them.

Not everybody is so lucky unfortunately.

The cost isn't actually the main barrier to availability of ID. It's mostly the timing. They're typically only available at a DMV office, which are only open 9-5 on weekdays (or similar hours). This means taking a day off work, which for many poor people would be a major expense. Most won't have any form of paid time off, so they lose at least the days wages. Not to mention how few DMVs there are in many regions, and the resulting transportation expenses (need to take an express bus to get there in in time to wait in line and get the ID before they close).

Many places with voter photo ID laws provide nondriver IDs for free.

With how much paperwork required and at what cost (time, money) to obtain? And, like Texas, are the places to obtain ID few and far between?

https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-har...

Right, it takes paperwork to verify identity, otherwise the ID would be worthless. I've also never met an adult that _doesn't_ have some form of photo ID.

I understand that it's important to protect our poor and all that, but requiring proof of citizenship to vote seems pretty important to me in our democracy, and is an incredibly low bar that nearly everyone is already capable of meeting.

I’ve never met one either, but that could not be any less relevant. The ACLU says that 11% of American citizens have no ID.

https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

That statistic came from the Brennan Center for Justice, which has a history of bias-driven research[1]. They have also taken massive donations from George Soros. I question the legitimacy of their "research."

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Brennan_Center_for_Justice#Bias

edit: Why am I being downvoted for doing research on citations? It's kind of important to be critical of these kind of things.

Ok, how about another study. 100k in Wisconsin alone.

http://www4.uwm.edu/eti/barriers/DriversLicense.pdf

That research is incomplete. Look at the bottom of page 3:

"A portion of the population without a drivers license – whether valid or not – will have a photo ID, but without an analysis by race and location, it is not possible to estimate that population. "

The question here isn't whether or not they have valid drivers license, it's whether or not they have a valid photo ID good enough to vote with.

Thank you for providing that link, though. It's less biased than the others so far.

It’d be one thing if the politicians pushing voter ID were also pushing hard on making it easy, but when you look at Alabama cutting off access to IDs st the same time they’re requiring them, it’s hard not to draw obvious conclusions about intent.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-drivers-licen...

I agree completely. IMO, voter ID laws should only be legal if photo IDs are free. If a state simultaneously restricts access to IDs while requiring them, then that's voter suppression.

I’d argue free isn’t enough. Free and accessible is necessary, but given how hard it is to obtain a birth certificate e.g. there’s more to the problem.

Honestly where does this George Soros Boogeyman spring from? His philanthropy seems way less insidious and society undermining than the Kochs, Mercer, DeVos.

I guess it depends on where you sit...

How do you know? Do you ask everyone you meet for an ID?

There's a lot of people who live in the "fringes" of society who don't have an ID.

My uncle, for example. He lived with my grandma his whole life and didn't have a driver's license, car, or a job other than to run errands for my grandma.

I also have a friend who does not have an ID. Her husband takes care of everything and she doesn't drive.

It's unusual but not illegal to live like that.

Well, anecdata aside, an estimated 20 million Americans don’t per one study.

http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/do...

> I've also never met an adult that _doesn't_ have some form of photo ID.

I'm sorry you live in a bubble and can't see past it.

In Pennsylvania, about $30. That's at the high end. In Ohio, it's $8. Generally good for four years. Is $2 per year an impediment to voting?

The cost of the id itself is only part of the real cost. There's transportation expenses, taking time off work to go, in some cases it is expensive to get the documents necessary to even get an ID like a birth certificate

Of course it is.

Fortunately decades of history and court decisions disagree with you.

Well, I do.

So we're at an impasse.

See, my deal is, you want to make this whole system more complicated at several steps, and for what benefit? To solve what problem?

I'd rather keep the system as simple as possible--cheaper, easier, less can go wrong that way, and more people get to vote and participate in governance.

The US has close to the highest spending in the world on k-12 education per student.

Don't blame GP; he was probably educated here. Part of that education is learning who may be criticized for a failure to accomplish the tasks for which they were hired. Public school administrators and teachers are certainly not among those.

My running hypothesis is that people can't see any way to enact change that also serves as a socially-acceptable life path.

Or, to put a finer point on it: some people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "violent protesting", but they abhor being seen to personally enact violence more than they want change. Other people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "becoming involved with politics", but they abhor being seen as a politician more than they want change. Etc.

There are problems people want solved, but the same people that want the problems solved have things they not only care about, but which society expects them and tells them and perhaps in some senses brainwashes them to prioritize over their own needs. Everyone in the modern world is afflicted to some degree with a social anxiety telling them that their families and friends would disapprove of their doing anything so outré as actually fighting for change (rather than preaching-to-the-choir about change), especially when that could hurt or endanger said family and friends. As the thinking goes, you're just not supposed to risk the people you love for something as silly as bettering democracy.

(And yes, that's even true when a person's family and friends are outwardly exactly the people who claim to want change, and who hold forth about the change that needs to happen, and disapprove of the people who don't similarly hold forth. The people who spend their time signalling that they care about change, are some of the least interested in associating with the people who actually enact that change.)

Modern Western culture seemingly has entered a failure-mode unprecedented in history, where we have nobody willing to go first, to stand out, to do what needs to be done, to enact the changes everyone else wants. We've run out of empathetic iconoclasts—people who see the suffering of distant/distributed others, and for whom that aggregate suffering outweighs the risk that might come to the comfortable-life-in-obscurity of all their closer companions. The people with hearts that bleed for their fellow citizens, but then don't shrivel back at the thought of their companions being the ones who end up bleeding.

Let's also not forget about what happens to those empathetic iconoclasts: they are routinely assassinated. In fact I believe that the main reason Bernie Sanders is still alive is because his campaigns have been largely ineffective.

Everybody dies. Most people don't ever live.

> You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.

> Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOjpaIO2seY&t=18m40s

I would argue that even MLK Jr. had it easier specifically in social-approbation terms than we do today.

Nobody is, per se, afraid of low-probability high-impact events like being shot (otherwise nobody would join the military.)

But everyone is afraid of high-probability low-impact events, like being shunned by your community for committing a faux pas.

So, if actually acknowledging an elephant-in-the-room issue—or actually trying to get that issue fixed in a way that steps on people's toes, instead of endlessly debating how to get the issue fixed without stepping on anyone's toes—is considered such a faux pas; if it's considered something that gets you branded as low-status even by the people you're working to help, rather than something that gets you branded, at least in some small community, a hero—then the human mind just seems to say "fuck this strategy." We need acceptance—not from everyone, but at least from the people we are most trying to help. Without that, we see no reason to help them.

tl;dr: MLK Jr. may have had to choose to be a hero, but he never had to choose to be Batman. It's seemingly impossible to choose to be Batman. (Well, at least with normal human psychology. But even outside of that—even assuming benevolent schizoid folk who think Batman is a great life-path—we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.)

> We need acceptance—not from everyone, but at least from the people we are most trying to help.

If people were worth saving they wouldn't need saving. I need acceptance from myself, to be able to look myself in the eye, and I have that, by now. I made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I don't regret any instance of doing or trying to do the right thing, not to get gratitude or recognition from any external source, but because I consider it the right thing. Looking at just about anyone around me, it seems that much harder than never giving in is having given in, being broken or tamed, and then reclaiming yourself. And even suckier is never reclaiming yourself, now that is suffering. I wouldn't want to swap with any conformist or even just "average person who isn't rocking the boat" I know. They generally seem unhappy, slow, and boring even to themselves. I have my worst times behind me, they have their worst times still to come.

> we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.

Can't really confirm that for myself. You know how they say when you get into prison you have to not shirk the inevitable fight, or you're going to be the toy of others for the whole stay? Life is like that, too. I don't care what "random person who happens to be my contemporary" thinks of me, if anything, I would care what people like Sophie Scholl or Hannah Arendt would think of me. But more than that, what are the things you would think or say or do even if the whole world was against it? Because only that is really yours and really you. The rest doesn't hold water and will leave you in the ditch inevitably.

It seems to me like a lot of the apathy comes from the hopelessness people feel concerning their own situation in life. People don't see anything changing for themselves in the near or distant future, so that carries over into something they feel even more powerless about.

Feedback loop is way too long and way too uncertain for people to care. What can you even do to visibly affect decisions being made? There is nothing an individual person can do, because no one in power cares about individual people, whether they go picket or post to facebook.

There are tens of millions of people in the US that really want <X> to change, for a lot of <X>. However, without acting as a unified group they don't matter because they're dwarfed by equally disorganized and apathetic people who don't care. There are many examples from around the world of people getting what they want when they are numerous and well organized. Don't even need to look far, NRA is an example of this collective power (to some extent) in the US itself.

There is a social engineering solution to this somewhere, just like the current situation is a result of deliberate social engineering, not some inevitable evolution of democracy.

I'd argue that the NRA is an outlier, because of how closely it's tied to specific companies with a profit motive. This provides a stronger and more persistent organizational backbone then usually found among just concerned-citizens.

Depending on what Congress does, they don't even need to wait for the policy to be enacted before it could be affecting their sales, stock prices, and executive compensation.

In contrast, there aren't any companies who are so directly financially tied to the First Amendment. Oh, sure, it's a public good, but you can't sell free speech the same way you can sell guns.

The further power moves away from people, the less people can actually do to change things. What's the point of being outraged at the things you can't control. If the government continues to abuse people's rights, whats the point of getting upset, if you can't change anything about it. The closer power moves towards people the more likely they will take action... Instead of trying to be master conductors, the government should focus on returning power back to the states and back to the people.

If you look at the historical voting data, presidential election participation has been up since 2004. Mid-term elections have been about the same since the 70s, though 2014 did have unusually low participation. But I don't expect that to repeat in 2018 with all the divisiveness now.

http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101

You seem to be using voter participation as the measure of the health of democracy. If you look at the rates of voter participation over the last 100 years or so there is no sign that democracy has diminished over that time. The rate has fluctuated quite a bit and recent participation rates although not the highest are far from the lowest over that time period. And rates don't seem to be on a consistent downward trend that will bring them near the lows.

If you want to know how prohibition happend just look at the low point for voter participation.

http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101

I wonder if this is "efficient" though, like in the sense that it's the correct outcome given the actual incentives. Ie. the actual value of the given elected positions is such that everyone should correctly ignore that it exists. There is no individual benefit to taking on whatever menial responsibility the office represents, nor is there a systematic benefit that outweighs the personal cost for someone to heroically take on the duty anyway.

I guess what I'm asking is that if things are rotting upstream of these positions, then maybe they are "rationally vacant"?

By the very fact of how polemic Americans can be, Americans definitely do care. So, the real question is: is it maybe they're just not caring about what you care about? There's a myriad of issues a person can care about that you yourself probably don't and there's probably someone saying the same thing about you.

Most Americans have no experience with or understanding of political instability. So they think it's entirely viable to ignore politics and expect that things will just keep plugging along as they have. And then you look away and grad students are suddenly being taxed for waived tuition being considered income... And you look away again and suddenly an entire class of people are considered to have never existed in the country.

How you make people care? Unfortunately it might be crises makes them care. No crises, no consequences, no confrontation with the alternative? Then people find something else to care about, rather than care about what seems to be a non-issue that doesn't involve or affect them and isn't interesting anyway.

It's not that people don't care, but that people have lots of things they could vote on and can't rationally make considered decisions on all of them. You can't 'make people care' unless you give them an incentive, and it's irrational to expect everybody to care about everything.

My pet theory is that a lot of the apathy comes down to modern outrage clickbait media. There's a new OMG HORRIBLE NEWS EVERYTHING IS FALLING DOWN AND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER FOREVER emergency seemingly every day. They milk it for a day or two, sometimes a week, then they find something new.

When everything is important and urgent, nothing is.

Could you please not use all caps for emphasis? It's basically yelling, and the site guidelines specifically ask you not to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But I was demonstrating that the media is yelling at us. Making it look like yelling was intentional.

I didn’t know HN had guidelines specifically disallowing all forms of yelling.

Well, its more nuanced than that, and the answer to most ears would sound overly conspiratorial. The elite have done this on purpose, through many avenues but primarily through the education system. Civics are hardly a blurb in school anymore, so its no wonder people have an increasingly little sense of civic duty. What I base this assertion on though is controversial so I won't go into it unless specifically asked by someone with an open mind.

The same control of education as a tool to shape the common public mind was also exerted on media, which is why I say when people start arguing about Huxley and Orwell, that its a brave new world, until you resist... Then its 1984.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com